Thank you, this is great insight and gets us reading about the Armenian situation ahead of the event. Take your time to structure it, and like Nadia I think it will be super if the description will mention what it is you will want to achieve with the session, what questions will be answered so that people know what angle to expect (one or more of the system fails to integration and how the RedWoodProject takes on duties normally pertaining to placement centers? or?). Also makes it easier for anyone to decide whether this is a session useful to them. We’ll be on the lookout for this!
So I’ve discussed with ARP and got several ideas I’m going to dive into during the session: for instance, I often come across the fact that refugees become overly dependent on our aid when we get too involved. It is very hard to find a balance when we want them to become self-sustainable in the long run.
Another subject I’d like to touch is the facilitation of information communication for the refugees in Armenia, we got many organisations that offer different kinds of help but it seems like refugees do not have access to the information and feel lost when they need help(healthcare, housing, employment, food/clothing, etc).
I am currently doing a desk research about how to improve the social services for the refugees here in Armenia and what I’ve learnt so far is that we definitely need an independent unit with social workers with a call center, lawyer, social broker/real estate agent and employment agent.
Here’s our latest blog entry about why Armenian organisations should cooperate to ensure resiliency in the face of the Syrian crisis. I’ve also done several case studies of Syrian-Armenian refugees in Armenia: here are the stories of Ilona and Ashkhen.
@KiraVde@Iriedawta Thanks for the smart idea and the suggestion! The creation of an independent unit with social workers and experts seems to me very interesting. Can be a type of call center, with a frontline helpdesk, and a second line support.
I was wondering what is the public perception towards refugees in Armenia?
I was recently part of a small communication project, implemented by a local NGO, about the situation of refugees in general and in Romania. One of the activities was to go to universities and talk to students about the challenges that migrants and refugees face. I intuitively knew it, but I was still taken by surprise by the negative attitude towards refugees that some of the students we interacted with had. Maybe it was just ignorance and lack of information, but I founded it concerning since it’s not rarely that refugees have to rely on others’ support and open-mindedness .
Good question, @Teo. Indeed this is another obstacle to the integration of the refugees in Armenia as the locals’ attitude towards them is if not hostile then at least indifferent. It is sometimes hard for the newcomers to rent an apartment as the landlords do not trust them and prefer to rent to locals or Europeans/Americans instead. Syrian shopkeepers and restaurant owners mention some local people do not prefer to buy from them.
As Armenia has lots of unsolved social issues(e.g. in Gyumri, the second largest city in Armenia lots of people still live in temporary houses provided by humanitarian aid back in 1988 due to the earthquake), some locals feel those issues should be addressed first before addressing the refugees’ issues.
This is sad, as most of the Syrian refugees in Armenia have Armenian origin and their ancestors fled the Turkish massacres of 1915-1924 to find shelter in Syria, and Armenians talk a lot about recognition of the Armenian Genocide forgetting that the grandchildren of the victims are now back in their homeland and they need urgent help.
Here is a great initiative by Natakallam (one of the founders is Armenian) aiming to alleviate the struggle of jobless Syrians in Lebanon by pairing them with students learning Arabic for conversation-focused classes over the internet.
In providing Syrians with work opportunities, the platform also caters to a specific need within the Arabic learning community interested in the spoken Levantine (especially Syrian) dialect.
Hi @Iriedawta, I hope all is good with you and your little one!
I’m curious if 10 months after we had this conversation the situation of Syrians ethnic Armenians has improved in your country? Some days ago in response to my post about the community dinner we organised in Cluj you mentioned you would like to do something similar in Yerevan? I was wondering how these food businesses set up by refugees (which you linked to) are progressing and if there is a chance of showing value for the community by involving them in such a simple, yet fun event? I look forward to returning, and 2017 is the year!! Let’s have a skype sometime to let you know about updates.
Hi @Noemi dear, thanks for checking in! Actually there is some improvement, concerning the awareness about the situation in the government and policy makers’ circle. I am happy to notice that now more and more agencies talk about the issue of Syrian refugees and the need to accommodate them and help them integate in Armenia. As for me, I gradually disengaged from the formal activities of Armenian Redwood Project (ARP) since it moved to a more bureaucratic and administrative sphere that I was not very comfortable dealing with, compared to the field work I have been doing for over a year, and currently I am only writing content and helping with field work. ARP has now teamed up with other agencies to work on a project of offering housing to the refugees with a lease, so that instead of paying rent they can pay for it monthly and own the apartment after a few years. As you know ARP has been subsidizing the rent of the refugees for the past couple of years.
Nowadays I’m juggling a few projects, all of them are important causes I care for and I wrote case studies about during the Futuremakers project - I’m managing a social enterprize Sunchild Eco Tours and the Eco Lodge in the only privately owned nature reserve in the Caucasus - the CWR, organizing events and the AiR program in the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Yerevan AND working on my own art project The Return: Environmental Portraits of the Syrian Refugees in Armenia together with my friend and a talanted photographer Anush Babajanyan of 4Plus Photography. The final product will be a photo exhibition and storytelling event that aimes to bring awareness to the issues of Syrian refugees in Armenia. And we will definitely involve the Syrian restaurants to provide food for our opening ceremony(maybe some collective cooking eventually). People in Armenia got to like and appreciate the taste of Levantene cuisine and Syrian food is popular more than ever in Yerevan!
So yeah, I’m uberstretched and have almost no me-time considering I’m single-parenting since I moved to Armenia in summer 2015. Luckily I have had the chance to be one of the beneficiaries of Stega 's 6 week yoga course for the changemakers of Armenia (just had my last class on Wednesday) and we hope to fundraise to offer yoga and meditative therapy classes for the refugees in the nearest future.
I’m also preparing another art project which is called “Juggling Dinosaurs” that is going to tackle the notion of single parenting in Armenia for females, who receive no support whatsoever…a woman, a mother, an activist and a professional trying to juggle it all…
So there you are, now you know why I was absent from the platform for such a long time…hope to meet you all for LOTE6(is it happening?) next year! Edgeryders(you, @Nadia, @Alberto, @Patrick_Andrews and Co) is always on my mind and I’m trying to follow all the developments on the platform. I will definitely come back!
Very happy you are keeping yourself busy with great endeavors! Alex is organising an event to increase learning across refugee workers and wider public within an arts fest in the end of February in London - we’re just now discussing potential formats… if we know your timeline who knows, maybe we come up with some idea
Thanks @Noemi, @Alex_Levene 's event seems exactly the kind of project I’d love to collaborate with! Concerning our timeframes, right now we are in full production phase and we will finish collecting stories and photos of the refugees(around 30-50 families) by January 2017. The final result of the first phase is going to be a presentation of our work and screening of the photos + storytelling. After this I will be curating an exhibition of the photography with captions and this will be a large scale event in Yerevan(probably April - May). We already got sponsored the first phase and more donors are interested to fund the second phase(Armenian Redwood Project, etc). To cut this short, I’d be more than happy to present the outcomes of the first phase during Alex’s event and possibly talk about the refugee situation in Armenia in general.
@Iriedawta. I think that would be really interesting. I could even talk to the organisers of the festival and see if they have space to exhibit some of the photographs at the festival.
I think the other benefit could be to line up the work you are doing in Armenia with some UK citizen-led charities who may be able to offer support and volunteers to help out in Armenia.
We really want the event to about positive steps forward, and were keen to share stories where people have made a real improvement, or created a new service themselves. If there are still issues and negative conditions within the refugee provision then it may be most useful to prepare a document that outlines these, with some suggestions as to how people could help from home. We could then circulate this at the event and make it available online through social media and the ER platform. Just an initial idea.
@Alex_Levene that’s great. Do find out if there is the possibility to exhibit our project/ host a presentation followed by a discussion during the event.
Other then that Syrian refugees in Armenia need psychological support(therapy, meditative yoga, etc) and there is no capacity in the country. So this is one kind of help we might need from your mentioned UK charities(language barrier might be an issue).
I did conducted a research in 2015 and I can share it if you are interested.
